The economic battlelines on which the Tories will seek to fight prime minister Gordon Brown at the general election clearly emerged yesterday as they attacked both his track record and his environmental credentials.

The combative response by George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, to the Pre-Budget Report was framed in the context of Mr Brown’s assumed accession to Number 10 next year. Mr Osborne taunted the chancellor over his “nods and winks” that a Brown premiership would break with the Blairite past, saying: “Labour can only be new once. If the public want change, then they are going to have to vote for it.”